PSA Group Unveils Personal PHEV

Most of us who drive cars do so with three or more empty seats. Those empty seats take up a lot of space on our streets and roads. France's PSA Group has one possible answer to this conundrum: a personal-sized plug-in electric hybrid

Published: 08-Dec-2017

It may never replace the ubiquitous family car, but the single-seat electric hybrid EU-LIVE EV could be a great boon to vehicle share programs where bikes and scooters are too subject to the vagaries of inclement weather and full-sized cars are personal mobility overkill.

Developed for France's PSA Group, owners of Peugeot, Citroen and now Opel car lines, the EU-LIVE falls into Europe's L5e class, which are three-wheeled vehicles with a top-speed greater than 50 km/h. Using its twin, in-wheel rear electric drive motors, it's capable of 70 km/h on its 48V Samsung SDI battery. What the energy storage capacity of the pack is hasn't been announced, so range in pure EV-mode isn't known. However, once its 31kW, single-cylinder Peugeot scooter motor kicks in for inter-city highway driving, the reported range is 300 km (186mi.) at a top speed of 130 km/h (80 mph).

PSA engineers garnered a dozen patents on the project, which began in 2015 in collaboration with the Virtual Vehicle Research Center in Graz, Austria, including its leaning system that keeps the vehicle stable in tight turns.

As to the fate of the project, that remains to be seen. Toyota built a handful of its Concept i Road EVs which it deployed in Japan, curiously, the French Alps region. Renault has built thousands of its Twizy EV, a two-place urban runabout.

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